Friday, August 2, 2013

The Very Best of Little Fyodor's Greatest Hits" "Peace is Boring" "The Unscratchable Itch: A Tribute to Little Fyodor"

(Discriminate Audio/Public Eyesore) Little Fyodor is blessed with a face, a voice, and body language that makes his presentation as a weirdo outsider music kook beyond convincing. What he doesn't possess is the ability to mask that his strange, urgent music is by no means the work of an outsider kook. This is deliberate, nuanced, masterful music by a smart, knowledgable musician, it's music that cohesively explores anxiety, lustfully contemplates sexuality, viciously considers God, war, death (a brutally morbid cover of "Both Sides Now)", nature, mental illness, and duck fucking. Not to say that Fyodor is divorced from the realm of Dr. Demento. By no means is that the case, he is messing with weirdness and novelty and audience expectation in ways that are all about the history of novelty recording. But if you laugh at this stuff the same way you laugh at Weird Al Yankovic then you have a hole in your soul. Though this stuff is funny -- laugh away -- it's just a different laugh.
As far as Fyodor's tribute album, we really don't need an army of home-taper all-stars reinterpreting LF's catalogue to prove to us that his compositions are solid, or that his vision is skewed and weird. But need and love are different, and I love hearing local non-legend Dan Susnara produce one of his best tracks ever, Amy Denio making Fyodor's angry fist shaking at God turn into a lovely fist shaking at God, Voodoo Organist intensifying the already intense, and all of Fyodor's friends at Discriminate Audio getting in on the fun (Boyd Rice, Nervesandgel, Brian M. Clark, and the great, great Ralph Gean contribute nobly). But at the end of the day, it's the Little one himself that we long to hear, so I'm anxious to heer him again pay tribute to his own talents soon.